Lower Saucon resident Gary Jones traveled the Yellow Brick Road to outfit a cast of 1,500 colorful characters in epic 'Oz the Great and Powerful'

For Lower Saucon Township resident Gary Jones, there's no place like home.

The costume designer recently spent more than 25 weeks out of the state outfitting hundreds of characters including a wizard, witches and munchkins for "Oz The Great and Powerful." But he admits that over the last two decades he's become more and more enamored of the Lehigh Valley.

"I love our neighborhood, and our neighbors," says Jones, who lives with his partner Neal Bell in the suburbs.

"We're very involved in community life. We go to the farmers market every weekend. We belong to the Chamber Music Society. We go to plays and musicals at Muhlenberg. And, over the holidays, we always check out a number of programs at Lehigh. We're totally attached to the Lehigh Valley."

Lately, though, Jones has loved the Lehigh Valley from afar. Over the last few months, he's been living in New Orleans working on "Elsa and Fred," an upcoming romantic comedy starring Shirley MacLaine and Christopher Plummer.

Before that, he spent five months prepping "Oz" in Los Angeles and then another six months on the set in Pontiac, Mich., where the film was shot. Working on the massive, 3-D fantasy was one of the most challenging assignments of Jones' career.

"We started by doing a lot of research and having ideas of the ways [costumes] should look in order to be [historically accurate] but as we went on, we really began creating a whole new world," he says. "It was exciting and freeing for me, a real adventure."

During his nearly 35-year career as a costume designer, Jones has worked on movies big ("Spider-Man 2"), small ("Vanya on 42nd Street") and in-between ("The Princess Diaries.")

He's earned an Academy Award nomination for "The Talented Mr. Ripley" (which he co-designed with Ann Roth, a Lower Mount Bethel Township resident), became director Garry Marshall's favorite designer after working with him on seven features, and outfitted a number of performers who went on to garner attention from Oscar, including Geraldine Page in "Trip to Bountiful."

Without exception, all of Jones' movies have been grounded in reality. Deciding to follow director Sam Raimi down the Yellow Brick Road to "Oz" required Jones to take a big leap of faith.

"I was ready to go, but every now and then, the size and the historical ramifications of the project would come over me," he says.

Opening Friday, "Oz The Great and Powerful" is an original story of sorts set before the action depicted in the 14 novels that author L. Frank Baum wrote between 1900 and 1920. The first in the series of Baum's books provided the basis for "The Wizard of Oz," the beloved Judy Garland musical from 1939.

"Oz The Great and Powerful" borrows characters that appeared in both the novels and the movie, such as the Munchkins and the Winkies, while also introducing new figures like the computer-generated China Girl (voiced by 12-year-old Joey King) and the monkey Finley (Zach Braff).

James Franco stars in "Oz" as Oscar Diggs, a small-time circus magician who is swirled away from Kansas to the merry old Land of Oz. At first, he thinks he's hit the jackpot until he meets three witches — Theodora (Mila Kunis), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Glinda (Michelle Williams) — who are not convinced he is the great wizard everyone's been expecting.

Reluctantly, Oscar is drawn into the epic problems of Oz. His mission: to try and put his magical arts to use long enough to transform himself not only into the great and powerful Wizard of Oz but also into a better man.

The sheer scope of the film is mind-boggling. Rumored to have cost $200 million, "Oz" required Jones to costume 1,500 actors. For the main characters — Oscar and the witches — Jones stitched together dozens, maybe hundreds, of costumes that looked the same but served different purposes. Some were made for stunt work while others were constructed to look more fantastical to signify the characters' growing closeness to the Emerald City.

Franco's Oscar wears the same black suit for the entire movie. Needless to say, a lot of thought was put into getting that suit exactly right. Initially, Jones researched the late 1880s to figure out what men of that day were wearing.

Jones then made a prototype of the outfit, which he showed to Franco in New York. The actor screen-tested and rescreen-tested the costume, each time with new fabric alterations.

Seven months later, Jones was happy with the end result — a suit that communicates both Oscar's roots as a showman and also his more mystical traits as a wizard-in-training.

"I think the suit does a good job of keeping us in touch with where Oscar came from," says Jones, who constructed 22 copies of the garment, which he then altered to appear in various stages of wear. "The suit makes him look sharp and dapper when he needs to look sharp and dapper, and it can make him look less than sharp and dapper when he needs to look less than sharp and dapper."